Motivation:
Do you remember when you fell in love? You understood your partner blindly, you felt trust and you were able to do amazing things together effortlessly?
You can achieve the same with your team, but longer lasting and minus the heartbreak and the expensive divorce lawyers. That’s what we call professional love. You don’t believe us? Proof us wrong!
In Mandy Len Catron’s Modern Love essay, “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This”, she refers to a study by the psychologist Arthur Aron (and others) that explores how interpersonal connectedness can be accelerated by a specific series of personal questions. The 36 questions in the study are broken up into three sets, with each set intended to be more probing than the previous one.
At Play4Agile 2021 the inventors of this simulation wanted to explore how this series of personal questions can inspire the creation of team related questions. The idea is, that creating your own team related questions and answering them leads will also lead to more interpersonal connectedness within the team.
Goal of the Game:
The goal of playing “Professional Love! Prove us wrong!” is to help build psychological safety in a team. The game aims to increase the level of trust in the team, which will improve team collaboration, may help form team agreements, allow for people to build to ask for help, shift from a team with conflict to a team that has constructive conflict, and help people to grow. Let’s create joy in teams!
Instruction Variants:
- 5 – 10 minutes introduction. Goal, Motivation and mechanics
- 15’ Round one with questions from Set 1
- 4’ Choose one question by chance. Ask each team member to transfer the question to the team context. The goal is to write a question that you are willing to answer and interested in the answers of your team mates.
- 1’ Dot Voting on the questions (number of votes = number of available questions / 3)
- 4’ Encourage everybody to answer the questions voluntarily by writing on post its .
- 6’ Let them share their answers with each other.
- 15’ Round one with questions from Set 2 (analog Set 1)
- 15’ Round one with questions from Set 3 (analog Set 1)
- 10’ Debriefing
- Untested Twist for more than 5 team mates
- Split them in two sub groups that work on different questions
- Decide by chance if each sub group answer the prioritized questions of itself or the other group
Number of Players:
- Works perfect for team size <= 5 team mates
- Works with twists for <= 10 team mates
Timing:
- Plan for ~60 minutes.
Materials:
- Question examples (ToDo)
- Miro Template & Miro Example of played sessions
Credits:
Anke Stettner, Yvonne Wurzel, Matthias Drescher, Glenn Waters, Janek Panneitz, Rebekka Mander, Markus Wittwer, Michael Kaufman, Martin Heider
